OS X: Most Mac users know that Pixelmator is pretty much the best Photoshop alternative you can get. At less than $30, you'd pay more to use Photoshop for a month. That said, Pixelmator always lacked a few flagship features of Adobe's behemoth—at least, until now.

Over the last year the creators of Pixelmator have added tons of new features to the app, chipping away at the little things that keep users paying Adobe large portions of their paycheck. With version 3.0, they've added one of the most notable differences: layer styles. You can now easily apply non-destructive effects to any layer to quickly add drop shadows, reflections, gradients, and more. This latest update now provides a liquify tool for moving around parts of your image, support for OS X Mavericks features (e.g. tags, multiple displays, and App Nap), and a new image editing engine to speed up just about every task across the app.

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While Pixelmator still won't replace Photoshop for some, this update brings it dangerously close for handling most any common image editing task as well as or better than its far more expensive competition. If you've been holding out, you might want to give Pixelmator another look.